The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
A supplemental item, as used herein, is a data structure that comprises or causes a presentation of information to be shown in coordination with other media content. The other media content may include, without limitation, web pages, electronic publications, and other types of documents. A user will have typically indicated an express intent to view the other media content, such as by opening a document or clicking on a link. In contrast, the supplemental item is typically not expressly requested by the user. An example of a supplemental item is an advertisement, which is a presentation of information intended to persuade an individual to take a particular course of action. Advertisements are often presented within or otherwise in coordination with media content. Other examples of supplemental items include, without limitation, content recommendations, widgets, user-generated comments, and so forth.
A particular category of advertisements described herein is third-party advertisements. Third-party advertisements are produced by a third-party entity (the “advertiser”) that is different from the producer or publisher of the media content. The publisher of the media content will often be compensated by the advertiser, or an aggregator that distributes advertisements on behalf of multiple advertisers, for publishing third-party advertisements along with the publisher's own media content.
Advertisement placement within media content conventionally involves a number of processes. For example, one of these processes is selecting which advertisement to place within which items of media content. Various modern computer algorithms automate this selection process to a degree, based on factors such as the actual content of the media item into which an advertisement is to be placed, current or historical information about an individual to whom the media content is intended to be shown, current or historical information about a client device at which the media content is to be shown, the time of day, and so forth.
Another process involved in advertisement placement is determining where within the media content to show an advertisement. This determination is typically a manual process, made by the publisher when designing the layout of content within a certain media. The publisher will often designate certain sections within or around the media content as being sections in which advertisements may be placed. For greater flexibility in advertisement placement, these sections are typically of pre-defined sizes, dictated by the advertisement industry. A given advertisement may then be re-used by a variety of publishers, thus avoiding the need to create new advertisements for each and every publication in which the advertisement will be shown. For example, in the web publishing industry, it is common for advertisers to distribute their advertisements as image files of pre-defined image sizes, often referred to as “banners.”
Unfortunately, conventional advertisement placement techniques make it easy for a user to recognize and ignore advertisements without ever actually considering the content of those advertisements. For example, since web advertisements consistently appear in the same sections of the web site, users often habitually ignore those sections. As another example, since web advertisements are made to appear the same across all web sites, the appearance of a web advertisement will often be quite different from that of original web site content. Users thus often intuitively differentiate between original web site content and an advertisement. Consequently, users often intuitively ignore an advertisement, even if it appears in an unusual position. For these and other reasons, conventional advertisement placement techniques are increasingly ineffective.